Housing is a fundamental need and universal part of human living that shapes our lives in profound ways that go far beyond basic sheltering. Where we live can determine our self-image, social status, health and safety, quality of public services, access to jobs, and transportation options. But the reality for many in America is that housing choices are constrained: costs are unaffordable, discriminatory practices remain, and physical features do not align with needs. We have made a national commitment to decent housing for all, yet this promise remains unrealized.

Housing in America provides a broad overview of the field of housing. The evolution of housing norms and policy is explored in a historical context while underscoring the human and cultural dimensions of housing program choices. Specific topics covered include: why housing matters; housing and culture; housing frameworks and political ideologies; housing and opportunities; housing and the economy; housing discrimination; housing affordability; rental housing; and housing and climate change. Readers will gain an understanding of the basic debates within the field of housing, consider the motivations and performance of various interventions, and critically examine persistent patterns of racial and class inequality.

With short case studies, primary source materials, reflective exercises, strong visuals, and interviews with practitioners, this introductory text explores improving housing choices in America.

This book explores God's use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the Pentateuch, it reads biblical narratives and codes of law as documenting formations of theopolitical imagination. Ophir deciphers the logic of divine rule that these documents betray, with a special attention to the place of violence within it. The book draws from contemporary biblical scholarship, while also engaging critically with contemporary political theory and political theology, including the work of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz, and Michael Walzer.
Ophir focuses on three distinct theocratic formations: the rule of disaster, where catastrophes are used as means of governance; the biopolitical rule of the holy, where divine violence is spatially demarcated and personally targeted; and the rule of law where divine violence is vividly remembered and its return is projected, anticipated, and yet postponed, creating a prolonged lull for the text's present.
Different as these formations are, Ophir shows how they share an urform that anticipates the main outlines of the modern European state, which has monopolized the entire globe. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in revisiting the deification of the state, unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.

This book examines the digitalization of longstanding problems of technological advance that produce inequalities and automated governance, which relieves subjects of agency and critical thought, and prompts a need to weaponize thoughtfulness against technocratic designs.

The book situates digital-era problems relative to those of previous sociotechnical milieux and argues that technical advance perennially embeds corrosive effects on social relations and relations of production, recognizing variation across contexts and relative to entrenched societal hierarchies of race and other axes of difference and their intersections. Societal tolerance, despite abundant evidence for harmful effects of digital technologies, requires attention. The book explains blindness to social injustice by technocratic thinking delivered through education as well as truths embraced in the data sciences coupled with governance in universities and the private sector that protect these truths from critique. Institutional inertia suggests benefits of communitarianism, which strives for change emanating from civil society. Scaling postcapitalist communitarian values through communitybased peer production presents opportunities. However, enduring problems require critical reflection, continual revision of strategies, and active participation among diverse community citizens.

This book is written with critical geographic sensibilities for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, humanities, and data sciences.

House Sharing and Young Adults offers unique insight into the dynamics of successful house sharing among young adults and questions some of the myths fostered by the negative stereotyping of housemates. Illustrated with research from interviews with young adults, it explores co-residence, interpersonal relationships and young people's development.

Beginning with an overview of the concept and history of house sharing among young adults, Clark and Tuffin's volume also examines the reasons for the lack of research into the area up until recently. It explores key questions, including how young adults choose housemates, what makes a desirable housemate, avoiding complications, the psychological advantages of house sharing, how conflict arises, and the impact of house sharing on adult development. The authors challenge the stigma of shared domesticity, demonstrating the potential of house sharing to enhance well-being through companionship while acknowledging the potential pitfalls caused by tension in intimate settings.

House Sharing and Young Adults will be essential reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of social psychology, developmental psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as those interested in group dynamics, housing demographics and discrimination.

This book offers a theological, and more specifically ecclesiological, response to the philosophical problem of divine hiddenness. It engages with philosopher J.L. Schellenberg's argument on hiddenness and sets out a theologically rich and fresh response, drawing on the ecclesiological thought of Gregory of Nyssa. With careful attention to Gregory's work, the book shows how certain ecclesiological problems and themes are critical to the hiddenness argument. It looks to the gathered church (the church as the body of Christ) and the scattered church (the church as the image of God) for relevance to the hiddenness problem. The volume will be of interest to scholars of theology and philosophy, particularly analytic theologians and philosophers of religion.

Presidential term limits have been a crucial institutional feature of the third wave of democratization. They are meant to safeguard democracy by promoting alternation in office and preventing the personalization of power. However, since the 1990s term limits have been subject to frequent contestation by incumbents. Such contestation process has often been considered a sign of autocratization, particularly when it involves the weakening of other constitutional constraints, such as courts and legislatures. Term-limit contestations have attracted the attention of scholars working with a global perspective as well as with a regional or country-specific one too. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are focal points of these trends, despite their different histories of presidentialism and diverging types of term-limit rules.

This book generates new empirical and theoretical insights by bringing together the scholarship on Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, providing context-bound intraregional research as well as long-term perspectives for the study of term-limit change. The chapters advance novel findings on institutionalization, the power of precedence, incumbent-centred strategies, and approaches to protect presidential term limits.

This volume will be of great use to students and researchers interested in Latin American and African studies, comparative politics as well as political leadership. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Democratization.

This book offers original theoretical and empirical insight into the social, cultural and ecological politics of rapidly changing urban spaces such as old factories, rail yards, verges, dumps and quarries. These environments are often disregarded once their industrial functions wane, a trend that cities are experiencing through the advance of late capitalism.

From a sustainability perspective, there are important lessons to learn about the potential prospects and perils of these disused sites. The combination of shelter, standing water and infrequent human visitation renders such spaces ecologically vibrant, despite residual toxicity and other environmentally undesirable conditions. They are also spaces of social refuge. Three case studies in Milwaukee, Paris and Toronto anchor the book, each of which offers unique analytical insight into the forms, functions and experiences of post-industrial urban greenspaces. Through this research, this book challenges the dominant instinct in Western urban planning to "rediscover" and redevelop these spaces for economic growth rather than ecological resilience and social justice.

This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of Urban Planning, Ecological Design, Landscape Architecture, Urban Geography, Environmental Planning, Restoration Ecology, and Aesthetics.

The Future of the City Centre: Global Perspectives debates future directions. It looks beyond the post-industrial, post-commercial, and post-retail city centres to examine differing visions of the future form and function of the urban core. This theme and the related sub-topics will assist the development of future city models and help to contextualise urban change.

The in-depth research covers not only urban form and the re-use of the built heritage but also the provision for cultural events and different forms of entertainment that will offer vitality, together with visitors and responsible tourism. City authorities are starting to realise that structural changes are happening in city centres, as their influence is declining, and therefore new forms of governance will be needed. The book is based on an international research network hosting four symposia over 24 months. They took place in four cities in four different continents to encompass a world view of developed and developing countries. This book offers theoretical and practical perspectives from leading thinkers, academics, and practitioners, drawing on thematic issues explored across four international cities: Newcastle, UK; Newcastle, Australia; Pretoria-Tshwane, South Africa; and Joao Pessoa, Brazil. It draws on a wider set of global examples to reveal the shared issues and pressures being brought to bear on city centres and the diversity of responses being undertaken to ensure their long-term future.

The book includes illustrations from cities around the world, and it is directed at academics, students, and professionals in architecture, planning, urban design, the built environment, geography, economics, sociology, and cultural studies.

This volume advances a comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to the affective lives of institutions - theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and critical. With this approach, the volume foregrounds the role of affect in sustaining as well as transforming institutional arrangements that are deeply problematic.

As part of its analysis, this book develops a novel understanding of institutional affect. It explores how institutions produce, frame, and condition affective dynamics and emotional repertoires, in ways that engender conformance or resistance to institutional requirements.

This collection of works will be important for scholars and students of interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies from a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, organizational and institution studies, media studies, social philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory.

This book introduces the policies surrounding legal gender recognition of trans people in Kazakhstan. Generally, the research in this sphere focuses on medical professions, described as gatekeepers or judges deciding who fit the prescriptions of being a woman or a man, and on trans people themselves, who are often portrayed as victims. However, this process is more complex than only describing the interaction of these two groups or by labelling them either as gatekeepers or victims. The project provides a critical approach and attempts to expand our understanding of the process, the dynamics and the actors involved. This study will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Kazakhstan, and of feminism and LGBTQ activism more generally.

This is the first textbook to adopt an integrated perspective of climate change in Australia, drawing on research from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021, 2022) Sixth Assessment Reports to make it the most up-to-date resource available. It fills a knowledge gap in an ever-increasing hot topic for the country, its people, economy and environment.

Australia has been identified by a number of respected sources as a 'climate change hotspot', with all major sectors of the economy considered vulnerable or highly vulnerable to the anticipated adverse impacts of climate change. The chief industry sectors examined in this book include energy, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, tourism and mining. Other chapters focus on other key thematic areas, such as protected areas and world heritage sites (including their natural and cultural values), coastal and island environments, biosecurity, biodiversity and ecosystem services, human health, water resources, cities and settlements, rural and regional areas, and Indigenous communities.

Ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate students with limited science backgrounds, this book will inform those undertaking business, management, sustainability, education, environmental, development or heritage studies and other social science programs.

This focused study is one of the few analytical resources in English that covers the ancient and early medieval history of one of the least studied areas of the vast mountainous Pamir region of Central Asia: Shughnan.

The book brings together scattered fragments of information from a wide range of early Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic sources, the accounts of early European travellers and the scholarly contributions of Soviet and post-Soviet authors, as well as personal accounts and oral history material from the region. Drawing on historical, archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic data, it provides a holistic overview of the kingdom of Shughnan. It also attempts, for the first time, to identify and locate the town of K?han, which the Chinese historical chronicle, the Tang Shu (Book of the Tang Dynasty, 618-907 CE) describes as the 'first capital' of Shughnan. Many archaeological sites are examined and offered as potential candidates for the location of the town of K?han, providing a foundation for future archaeological and ethnolinguistic research in the area.

Ancient and Early Medieval Kingdoms of the Pamir Region of Central Asia: Historical Shughnan and its Lost Capital is suitable for students, scholars, and historians studying ancient and early medieval Central Asia, particularly the Pamir region, as well as those interested in Central Asian history and archaeology more broadly.

Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia provides a history of fascist movements and anti-fascist resistance in Australia over the past century.

In recent years, the far right has become a resurgent force across the globe, resulting in populist parties securing electoral victories, social movements organising on the streets, and acts of right-wing terrorism. Australia has not been immune to this. However, this is not merely a recent phenomenon; it has a long history of fascist and far-right groups and individuals. These groups have attempted to situate themselves within the wider settler colonial political landscape, often portraying themselves as the inheritors of a violent and exclusionary colonial past. Concurrently, these groups have linked into globalised anti-communist and white supremacist networks. At the same time, Australia has often seen resistance to fascism and the far right, from the political centre to the far left. Covering the period from the 1920s to the present day, and featuring insights from historians, sociologists, and political scientists, this book provides the most detailed account of this fascinating and important topic.

This book will be of interest to students and activists with an interest in the extreme right and anti-fascism as well as Australian history, politics, and society.

This book offers an anthropological account of Sri Lanka's Eelam Wars III and IV. It is based on the life-narratives of ex-servicemen who fought on the frontlines. The volume approaches militarism as a practice of masculinity. It explores the sense of embattlement that young recruits feel, which stems from the inner war between notions of bodily deference instilled in childhood and having to conduct offensives on the battlefield. Thus though they wish to move smoothly into the assault techniques learnt in combat-training, they sometimes find their bodies are acting-out a different trajectory; engaging in acts of spectacular violence or simply running away. It traverses themes such as masculinity and Sinhala society, British martial masculinity vs the composed body in Sinhala discourse, combat-training and the battlefield. The author traces the ways in which troops tried to negotiate the thin line between valour and violence in a context in which the enemy's suicide fighters engaged in the more extreme code of sacrificing-the-body, which derided the very manliness of soldiers who couldn't prevail against them. She argues that the Sri Lankan experience has resonance for soldiers on battlefields everywhere, who become embattled when confronted by adversaries whose practice seems to diminish their own manliness.

Rich in ethnographical narratives, this book will be interest scholars and researchers of war studies, gender studies, masculinity studies, peace and conflict studies, ethnic studies, political science, international relations, sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies, and South Asian studies, especially those concerned with Sri Lanka.

The book takes a close look into the definitions and categorizations of marginality, inequality, agency and location in society. It examines the systems of marginalization and othering by exploring perspectives of socially excluded people and communities in Northeast India.

The context of Northeast India provides unique perspectives on the debates around marginality due to the existence of multi-ethnic cultures in the region and since its prolonged colonial historical experience alienated it from the rest of India. This volume focuses on the issues pertaining to tribe, caste, gender identity, religion, and physical disability in the region. It also looks at the roles which institutions, education and the media play in the creation and perpetuation of social exclusion and the centre-periphery binary. With essays from eminent scholars and social scientists, the book discusses themes such as citizenship and borders, national and tribal identity, the role of the law, government and policies for countering exclusion and the challenges which socially excluded groups and communities face to gain agency, autonomy and the right to equality.

This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of sociology, Northeast India studies, political sociology, development studies, political science, gender studies, and social anthropology.

Any attempt to homogenize Kashmiri society or the politico-cultural discourse on Kashmir is a dangerously flawed exercise. To that end, the chapters in this book address various aspects of the political, cultural, and socioeconomic life in Kashmir. These chapters are interdisciplinary interventions that could potentially bridge ethnic, religiocultural, and political divides in the region. The book is divided into three sections: the first section explores history and memory, offering a critical dialogue between these phenomena and fiction. The chapters in section two offer a critical dialogue between history, politics, and gender, analyzing historical and political discourses to underscore the agential capacities of Kashmiri women, which are, traditionally, subsumed within masculinist discourse. The sole chapter in section three foregrounds the complex relationship between history, trauma, and poetry.

Taken together, this book is a nuanced attempt at giving readers the opportunity to engage with multiple subjectivities, historical understandings, and political opinions. It will be of interest to general readers, scholars, and advanced students of Literature, Politics, History, Human Geography and Sociology.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Review.